Friday, May 26, 2017

I first heard U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree in Western Australia. The album's Cinemascope sound provided the soundtrack for my next few months traveling the breadth of that expansive country from Perth, to Uluru (Ayers Rock), to Darwin, to Melbourne, to Sydney. Having spent a number of summers as a kid traveling across the grand deserts of the United States, I could hear the arid landscape in U2's songs. And while riding through the red deserts of Australia's outback I felt right at home. I gazed at Anton Corbijn's evocative black and white photography each time I pulled The Joshua Tree out of the cassette case and popped it into my Walkman. My brother Kent is a poet, and I thought of him often as I listened to the poetic, atmospheric wash opening the album. In those Australian months, I often peered out of a bus window as we careened through the desert dust with Bono's plaintive wail in my ear. From Bullet the Blue Sky, to Red Hill Mining Town, to Mothers of the Disappeared the songs on The Joshua Tree echoed and expanded a growing mistrust of the dangerous elements in Reagan era U.S. and Thatcher era U.K. policies. Thirty years later, in our even more dangerous era under Trump, the political and emotional concerns embedded in The Joshua Tree ring loudly. It is fitting that U2 is playing the entire album from start to finish on their most recent tour.

Last Saturday, May 20, 2017, I joined an enthusiastic throng at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena to listen to U2's 30th Anniversary take on their groundbreaking album. Before U2's set began, a series of powerful poems was scrolled across the screen behind the stage.

There were many beautiful musical moments at the Rose Bowl, from Edge's chiming guitar, to Adam Clayton's deep, fat bass, to Larry Mullin's powerful drumming, to an engaged Bono. For much of the evening, U2 performed in front of a giant video screen filled with Corbijn's evocative new imagery, and later filmed tributes to women's rights and the plight of Syrian refugees. As Bono says to Andy Greene in Rolling Stone:

"Let's meet one such immigrant who he wants to turn away from the shore. I commissioned french artist J.R. He didn't have much time to do it. Where are we going to find this girl? He finds her in Zaatari in a camp in Jordan, which I visited with my daughter and [my wife] Ali a year ago. He finds this incredible spirit, Omaima. She talks about America as a dreamland. She closes her eyes and J.R. asks her in another segment of the film we don't broadcast, 'What do you see when you think of America?' She goes, 'Oh, it is a civilized country and they are a good people.' It was just heartbreaking."

A giant banner bearing a photo of Omaima, the young Syrian refugee featured on the large screen, was carried through the crowd during Miss Sarajevo. An almost punkishly exuberant version of U2's first hit I Will Follow brought the house to their feet and the night to a close.

Note: The boorish Trump backers behind us, spitting and slurring drunken epithets towards Bono and the band whenever U2 ventured towards thoughts of social justice or civil rights provided proof that the world and the United States in particular needs this album and this band right now. Fortunately, the boors left early, leaving us more room to dream new dreams that night.

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Below I have posted many of the poems scrolled by U2 before the Joshua Tree 2017 concert at the Rose Bowl on May 20, 2017. I have also added poems shown on the massive video screens at earlier performances in Vancouver and Seattle. Please click on the identifying links to find the poem sources. And please follow up to purchase some of these amazing poets' powerful work. Links to the author's works for sale are provided below before each poem.

Sticky inside their winter suits the Sunday children stare at pools in pavement and black ice where roots of sky in moodier sky dissolve. An empty coach train runs along the thin and sooty river flats and stick and straw and random stones steam faintly when its steam departs. Lime-water and licorice light wander the tumbled streets. A few sparrows gather. A dog barks out under the dogless pale pale blue. Move your tongue along a slat of a raspberry box from last year's crate. Smell a saucepantilt of water on the coal-ash in your grate. Think how the Black Death made men dance, and from the silt of centuries the proof is now scraped bare that once Troy fell and Pompeii scorched and froze. A boy alone out in the court whacks with his hockey stick, and whacks in the wet, and the pigeons flutter, and rise, and settle back.

George Elliott Clarke – “Ain’t You Scared of the Sacred?: A Spiritual”

Ain’t You Scared of the Sacred?: A Spiritual
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Divinity spies you naked.
Tremble or your heart breaketh.
Yes, I’s scared of the Sacred.
Yes, I’s scared of the Sacred.
So, I don’t fear anyone.
Love shakes me to the bone.
Adam and Eve weren’t angels—
Just apes with an alphabet.
Tremble before the Sacred!
Shake when you aim the bullet!
Best be scared of the Sacred!
Best be scared of the Sacred!
Divinity knows you naked.
Tremble or your house breaketh.
Believers can’t live forever;
And evil-doers gonna die.
Folks with religious Fever,
Burn hot with Hypocrisy.
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
I tremble like an angel
Fallen down, lone and naked.
Sinner, shout against the mosque?
Sinner, shout gainst the synagogue?
Sinner, your church is a kiosk,
And you’re struttin in a bog.
Best be scared of the Sacred!
Best tremble like an angel.
Better know you’re all naked:
Divinity sees every angle.
Best humble down and tremble.
Best humble down and tremble.
Shout proverbs at a mirror.
Condemn yourself for Error.
Best pray Mercy for your sins.
Your Pride is sham Innocence.
Best humble down, tremble well:
Only Love busts your jail cell.
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Put down that gun and that bomb:
Make your heart a saintly home.
Mercy, Mercy, everyone:
Defuse that bomb! Drop that gun!
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Ain’t you scared of the Sacred?
Divinity spies you naked.
Tremble or your heart breaketh.
Best be scared of the Sacred!
Best be scared of the Sacred!

This terrible, irritable dawn--
This morning of Mourning--
His obituary crowbars apart
Prophecy and Nostalgia....
Always native to Heaven,
Minting gleaming melodies,
Freeing a nailed-down Christ,
Obeying the mating-calls
Of mandolins and guitars, he
Never abstained from Liberty,
Never lost the Intelligence
Of Dylan-dark sunglasses
And light making masterpieces
Of shambles, or lighting up
Cages where lovers loll,
Lousy with tears and sighs....
Poet of Everything,
He transcended conclaves
Of critics, the murders
Of poets, all those copycats--
Sordid franchisees of blues--
Every presidency serving up
Immaculate Corruption, the stale,
white bread circulated with grease....
His insatiable suitcase,
Portaging Gog and Magog
(In eastern Quebec), Hydra,
Rue Main, Manhattan, Havana,
Pursued the ghosts of Glory--
Parliaments of movie screens--
Fiestas of butterflies, and secret
Eros, Eros, everywhere....
After auditing the News,
I suffered the insomnia
Of steel nails, heads battered
Until drowsy, woozy in wood.
Eternity expires as eyes close--
Or we succumb to sobbing....
But the honest poet voids
The dirty mind of Grief,
Knows the poet's grave
Is his deathless poems--
Dark, remorseless Beauty--
Light that scalpels eyes open.

These words I speak have been given
me by angels. Moon-faced, they fall
into sight at night and spread wings
of pine needles through my skin.
Stories appear down my arms, across
my legs, they wind my waist in red haloes.

I have been chosen by Tyee
to tell of the beginning. My flesh
is a series of writhing tablets.
Let me show it to you.
I will dance without veils.
My body is a voice.
Listen.
My feet tell the story of the lost tribes
who wandered in their own darkness.
When they reached the Promised Land
they did not know it, but fell
down its wet, green gullet,
emerged as ravens, whales, eagles.
You may see their names written across my toes
for just one dollar.

But wait!
There is more. Here, along
my thighs are the virgin births.
Sand coloured maidens bathed
in mountain streams, were filled with salmon roe.
Smolts swam in their bellies.
Move closer, hear
the swell of secret waters.
The women married totem pole carvers
and bore fishers who pulled in full nets.
Each night the mothers reconstructed
the bones, threw them back to the sea,
and the salmon lived again.
Stay,
I will let you touch their fins.

Here, on my breast, see this rusty wound?
A cross marks the time the stories
dulled and Tyee took a new name
and began to live somewhere else—
across the sea in a garden where the plants
grow at the feet of men and women
and not through the trunks of their bodies.
Yes, you may kiss it.
Our garden was cleared,
and spirits shrank, hid in glass cages,
their moon faces darting through golden
liquid to burn hotly behind stupid tongues.

They will speak to you from my mouth
if you will just buy me a drink.
No, don’t go yet!
You haven’t seen it all.
For ten bucks I will show you
every scar on my body.
Another ten, you can make your own.
I will dance for you in a veil
of red waterfalls.
Stay, I am a prophet.
Angels visit me at night with pen knives.

I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.

Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.

Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.

Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?

Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.

I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.

They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.

They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.

Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o’clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.

The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

When sleepless, it’s helpful to meditate on mottoes of the states.
South Carolina, “While I breathe I hope.” Perhaps this could be
the new flag on the empty flagpole.
Or “I Direct” from Maine—why?
Because Maine gets the first sunrise? How bossy, Maine!
Kansas, “To the Stars through Difficulties”—
clackety wagon wheels, long, long land
and the droning press of heat—cool stars, relief.
In Arkansas, “The People Rule”—lucky you.
Idaho, “Let It Be Perpetual”—now this is strange.
Idaho, what is your “it”?
Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?
What would my motto be tonight, in tangled sheets?
Texas—“Friendship”—now boasts the Open Carry law.
Wisconsin, where my mother’s parents are buried,
chose “Forward.”
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its. This does not represent that glorious place.
West Virginia, “Mountaineers Are Always Free”—really?
Washington, you’re wise.
What could be better than “By and By”?
Oklahoma must be tired—“Labor Conquers all Things.”
Oklahoma, get together with Nevada, who chose only
“Industry” as motto. I think of Nevada as a playground
or mostly empty. How wrong we are about one another.
For Alaska to pick “North to the Future”
seems odd. Where else are they going?

On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her
her first swimming pool. It had been
his favorite color, exactly—just
so much of it, the swimmers’ white arms jutting
into the chevrons of high society.
She had rolled up her window
and told him to drive on, fast.

Now this act of mercy: four daughters
dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic,
white families on one side and them
on the other, unpacking the same
squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same
waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags.
So he was dead for the first time
on Fourth of July—ten years ago

had been harder, waiting for something to happen,
and ten years before that, the girls
like young horses eyeing the track.
Last August she stood alone for hours
in front of the T.V. set
as a crow’s wing moved slowly through
the white streets of government.
That brave swimming

scared her, like Joanna saying
Mother, we’re Afro-Americans now!
What did she know about Africa?
Were there lakes like this one
with a rowboat pushed under the pier?
Or Thomas’ Great Mississippi
with its sullen silks? (There was
the Nile but the Nile belonged

to God.) Where she came from
was the past, 12 miles into town
where nobody had locked their back door,
and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park
under the company symbol, a white foot
sprouting two small wings.

The border is a line that birds cannot see.
The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.
The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.
The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe.
The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.
The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.
The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going.
The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so many.
The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a stop sign, always red.
The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished.
The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.
The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a thousand imaginations.
The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do not rhyme.
The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.

The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the evening.
The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far.
The border is two men in love with the same woman.
The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.
The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made.
The border is “NoNo” The Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.
The border is a locked door that has been promoted.
The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.
The border has become Checkpoint Chale.
The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken.
The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier.
The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.
The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing changes.
The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.

Related Poem Content Details

“I saw a friend from growing up who’s been
living in L.A. for about twenty years, and I
heard him say, ‘I’m from L.A.,’ and I said,
‘No, man, you from Philly. We don’t give
nobody up.’”
—Khan Jamal
jazz vibraphonist

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the timeor maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey towith its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs
and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

Neither your face, Higera, nor your deeds
Are known to me; and death these many years
Retains you, under grass or forest-mould.
Only a rivulet bears your name: it runs
Deep-hidden in undeciduous redwood shade
And trunks by age made holy, streaming down
A valley of the Santa Lucian hills.
There have I stopped, and though the unclouded sun
Flew high in loftiest heaven, no dapple of light
Flecked the large trunks below the leaves intense,
Nor flickered on your creek: murmuring it sought
The River of the South, which oceanward
Would sweep it down. I drank sweet water there,
And blessed your immortality. Not bronze,
Higera, nor yet marble cool the thirst;
Let bronze and marble of the rich and proud
Secure the names; your monument will last
Longer, of living water forest-pure.

Santa Monica-based artist Gregg Chadwick has been painting for three decades. His current studio is an old airplane hangar where the flurry of takeoffs and landings on the runway outside seems to creep into Chadwick’s paintings as he explores movement and travel within his light-filled paintings. His current series of paintings is entitled ‘Mystery Train’ and evokes the railways of America that Chadwick says run in his blood. His grandfather worked as a fireman, stoking coal in steam engines before advancing to train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. Chadwick often says that family gatherings brought the rhythms of the rails home. The sounds of railroad workers echoed in the music that Chadwick’s relatives played in the shadows of the train lines outside. For Chadwick and many others such as writer Greil Marcus, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and musicians Junior Parker and Elvis Presley, the enduring mythos of America and its legacy is wrapped in the blues notes of the song ‘Mystery Train’

Chadwick's thoughts on the intersection of art, culture, and politics can be found on his blog, Speed of Life.

Chadwick's flickr page which is often updated with new finished paintings and work in progress is at: